The message went around on Monday afternoon. Adam Hamilton, the pastor who is threatening to upend Kansas senatorial politics, was ill with laryngitis and would not be able to speak at his town hall event in the Shawnee Mission Unitarian Church. He needed to preserve his voice for Wednesday’s final debate against Roger Marshall, the Republican incumbent.
The polls suggest Hamilton is on the cusp of a sensational flip. Should he win, he will be the first Kansan Democrat to go to the Senate in Washington since George McGill, who boxed out of Wichita, did so back in 1930.
Some of those who gather at the church just before 5pm are unaware that the star attraction cannot be there. The idea of a religious man-turned-political revolutionary giving a town hall in Kansas evokes images of the pastoral – lonesome corn fields and white fencing. But this is on the fringes of Kansas City: it is a land of complex highways and the motorway signage art of the food chains and hotels, albeit against a sky that could have been sketched by Michelangelo.
The hosts, the Midwest chapter of grassroots organisation Boots on the Ground, have lined up Kathleen Sebelius, the former Kansas governor and secretary of health in the Obama administration, as a late replacement. She delivers a convincing synopsis of Hamilton’s decades of work around the Kansas City metropolitan area: a fifth-generation Kansan who grew his small church into the largest Methodist megachurch in America while establishing food and books and housing programmes for the local community.
RM Block
“I think he is a unique candidate who is smart and strategic and appealing to a lot of people whether they are Republicans or Democrats,” she says afterwards.
“And the environment is very hostile to a lot of policies president Trump has espoused and they are very hurtful to Kansans.”
Many Kansans knew of Hamilton long before he decided, at 62, to throw his hat into the ring of elite politics.
“Well, I’ve seen him in person as he is leader of the pastoral church and very active in our community,” Lisa Winchester says as the small crowd files out of the church after the town hall.
“His moral compass and his values are of the kind that we need right now. When he announced he was running ... I feel like people here are fairly pragmatic and I think do have good values and they will recognise a good candidate.”
But it was an unfortunate time for Hamilton to lose his voice. President Donald Trump was also in Kansas on Monday, holding a rally for Marshall 180 miles west in Wichita. Luckily for the Democrats, Trump had not heard of Hamilton’s misfortune or he would have found a way to work it into the text of a speech in which he sought to depict the pastor as yet another of the arrayed radical left activists who have usurped the traditional Democratic Party.
“Adam Hamilton used to say radical left things about me, bad things,” he said at a busy rally that contained at least six protesters ejected over the course of the evening.
“I never thought he would be running for office, but I used to hear about this lunatic up here. He is a radical left phoney. He supports flooding Kansas with unvetted refugees who will go around killing people, for no reason. He says it is okay for people to come in from the most dangerous places on Earth. Adam Hamilton uses church dollars to fund antireligious transgender activities. I mean ... he used a lot of church money to fund all of this transgender crap you are hearing about. He directs his followers to seven different websites to make children transgender. Adam Hamilton stated that he believes America is systematically racist and that America must REPENT! Repent, all of you white people. Terrible, terrible, white people. But he wants you to repent because you were born white – and that Kansans must also repent for eating beef because you are causing global warming.”
Trump’s Wichita rally is the latest in the personalised autumn publicity tornado he has visited across the toss-up states. Electioneering is a physically gruelling business. In Texas, James Talarico was struck down with flu for over a week. Now, Adam Hamilton has been laid low.
Donald Trump, though, has now held 17 rallies with another blitz before the November 3rd elections, seemingly impervious to seasonal bugs, or common illness or weakening vocal cords. Even his detractors are forced to concede he has the stamina of an ox. Whether this is of benefit to the Republican cause is the enduring strategical debate of these midterms.
“An election with an incumbent is always about the incumbent,” secretary Sebelius told a small group of media at the Shawnee church, including this publication and outlets ranging from Denmark to Japan, proof that the novelty of this race – an everyday pastor threatening to flip Eisenhower’s home state – has caught the imagination.
“President Trump has urged voters to think that he is on the ballot. I hope that Kansans do because I think they can connect their troubles with their inability to afford gas and groceries and healthcare with president Trump and they have a senator who will not speak up for Kansas. We need a new champion.”
Few American cities possess such a complex or fascinating political and historical geography as Kansas City. It famously traverses the state lines of Missouri and Kansas. Drive 20 minutes north and you can roam the bucolic homestead where Frank and Jesse James lived, and see, behind glass, the very boots Jesse James wore when he was shot dead by Robert Ford, and the family outhouse that must have made for perishing visits in the 19th-century Missouri winters.
Lenexa, just 20 minutes to the south, runs close to the old Santa Fe Trail but is a fast-growing city in its own right and sits in Johnson County where, Sebelius pointed out, some 23 per cent of all registered voters in Kansas live. It will play a crucial role in the outcome of a race that has been held up as a symbol of an unprecedented restlessness sweeping through Trump strongholds in these midterms.
Trump took an average of 56 per cent of the vote in Kansas in the last three presidential elections – and became in 2024 the first Republican since William McKinley to win the White House without winning Johnson County.
But Kathleen Sibelius believes that the Trump vote belies a fragmenting Republican vote that has been split since Bill Graves, then governor, faced a 1998 primary challenge from staunchly conservative state GOP chairman David Miller after he vetoed Bills on concealed weapons-carrying and abortion restrictions.
“We have had giants in the United States senate from Kansas,” she said of former Republican senators Bob Dole and Nancy Kassebaum.
“Then we have Roger Marshall.”
The Democratic hope is that a sufficient number of moderate and disillusioned Republican voters will pick up on Hamilton’s promise to restore “predictability and stability” to Kansans reeling from the roiling tariffs and fuel hikes that have jeopardised incomes.
But like many senate campaigns, the tenor of the Kansas debates has been drowned out by the deluge of television adverts castigating each candidate in a villainous light. Attack ads on Marshall are based on journalists reporting that in his years as the co-owner of a medical practice, he sued more than 700 patients for outstanding bills, leading to some 81 arrests of patients who missed scheduled court dates.
Marshall has protested the reports, telling CNN this week that he “would want no one to ever go to jail because of anything they owe me. There were people being bussed from other cities to us knowing I would take care of them for free”.
Hamilton, meanwhile, has been portrayed in a series of Two Faced, Too Extreme For Kansas attack adverts as having harboured a child predator in one of the church summer camps in the 1990s, inviting the perpetrator back even after he had been arrested. Hamilton, speaking hoarsely in a brief television interview on Monday, allowed that “mistakes were made” at the time but says that the adverts are an “incorrect description of what happened and, in the end, I helped get this man prosecuted”.
“We did what we could and got someone put in jail: Roger Marshall protected the Epstein files from being released.”
Both incidents will feature when the candidates meet for their concluding televised debate on Wednesday night. By then, Donald Trump won’t be in Kansas any more. But as he signed off with his familiar ‘make America great again’ refrain and YMCA shimmy, the president looked happy that all was good in Wichita.
“Well, I mean going to a Trump rally is kind of like going to the freak show at the carnival,” said Bill Graves, the former Republican governor.
“What’s he going to say? What’s he going to do? It’s always very entertaining but whether or not it translates into increased voting on behalf of Roger Marshall is, in my opinion, yet to be seen and hard to believe. This is just another indication of, I think, Trump’s infatuation with his own self. Loving to get in front of audiences. They are obviously the Maga crowd that is going to adore him.”
Graves has endorsed Adam Hamilton to become Kansas’s next senator.
